Attitude

A sunset after a terrible day for our country.

The other week at professional development the teachers looked at data which showed student test scores on a specific test over a number of years. One of the columns we were interested in was the degree of improvement over past performance. Some were surprised that some confident and generally high-ability students had low rates of improvement from year to year. 

But I noticed that the students who fell into this category - capable but not improvement enormously - had a similar attitude toward school work. These were the students who seem very afraid of failure. They are confident when they feel they know the answer, and very defensive when someone else implies that what they have said is lacking or incomplete or even wrong. 

That person can be me or another student. When it's me, the student is sassy in a low-key way. When it's another student, the response can be like a smack, as if to say with a comment or a kiss of the teeth "Don't you dare comment on what I'm saying. Like you could say any better!" 

It's about attitude. Students with this degree of fear of failure will not learn very much because they won't take many risks. How does one get to the point of feeling positively about the possibility of progress? How much of that is a teacher, how much parents, how much genes? How do we get to the point where we feel the way this letter writer in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, feels: 

While my companion contemplated with a serious and satisfied spirit the magnificent appearances of things, I delighted in investigating their causes. The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember. 

What a glorious thing is that gladness akin to rapture that we experience as we move through the world and learn about it? This gladness extends into adulthood, I can attest. Oh my goodness how badly I want to provide that rapture for students! And yet, they have work to do. 

Today LM worked hard to pronounce the word "insignificant" - a challenging word even for native speakers. She worked at it for over a minute, saying it properly several times to get it right in her mind. I praised her for the class, because she had stuck with it. That attitude will get her very, very far, and I think it comes from many sources other than me.

I'm trying to think about what short novels to read with my 11th and 12th graders this year. There are lots of teachers who blog about doing contemporary works with them, but I must say I'm wary. Especially contemporary works that deal with race, since that's an area where I am learning so much myself. 

Speaking of which, for white people who want to be allies and are educating themselves about inequality in our country and the magnitude of racial injustice, Between the World and Me should be considered essential reading. I'm so grateful that black writers and thinkers have not abandoned the struggle even confronted as they are by evidence of America's intransigence. 

I'm grateful there are those who tell it straight, like Ta-Nehisi Coates, and those who express the ideas in fits and bursts, like the poetry of Evie Shockley and Danez Smith. 

Evie Shockley

Here is a piece by Shockley which speaks of universal experience and black experience in a way which says to me that while whites and blacks inhabit the same physical space, the mental and emotional space is different. 

on new year’s eve

BY EVIE SHOCKLEY

       we make midnight a maquette of the year:

frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize

       the vows we offer to ourselves in near

silence: the competition shimmerwise

       of champagne and chandeliers to attract

laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace

       reflecting the burning intra-red pact

between beloveds: we cosset the space

       of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our

hoped-for adams with this temporal clay:

       each of us edacious for shining or

rash enough to think sacrifice will stay

       this fugacious time: while stillness suspends

vitality in balance, as passions

       struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends

towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions,

       ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut

that severs soul from bone: a long aching

       quiet in which we will hear nothing but

the clean crack of our promises breaking.

Below is the first section of a poem by Smith called "summer, somewhere." I wonder what it would be like to read or listen to these lines in a world in which there was not a war going on against black people. Or rather more realistically, what it would be like to have read these ten years ago before I was aware of much racial injustice. The hurt, the shadow of degradation that lurks behind all these lines might have passed me by without my shiver. But today when I read this, I shiver because the sunlight of justice is so clearly blocked by something massive.

Danez Smith

From “summer, somewhere” 

BY DANEZ SMITH

somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown

as rye play the dozens & ball, jump

in the air & stay there. boys become new

moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise

-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least 

spit back a father or two. I won’t get started.

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy

color of a July well spent. but here, not earth

not heaven, boys can’t recall their white shirt

turned a ruby gown. here, there is no language

for officer or law, no color to call white.

if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call

us dead, call us alive someplace better.

we say our own names when we pray.

we go out for sweets & come back.